Separating your customers into distinct segments will help your product in all sorts of ways. It can help you track the usage of your app in a more meaningful and granular way. It can also reveal how specifically different segments behave differently, which will help you prioritize future feature development as well as focus your marketing efforts.
Let's say you've just built a new feature, but it's not ready for a full release just yet. So, you decide to test it with a small group of people.
You can go about it in two ways - deterministic or random. The first way lets you specify people by name, email, company or any other attribute you know about them. The latter uses fancy math and probability to randomly assign users into groups. Let's see how you'd accomplish both using ConfigCat.
Focusing on frontend applications, we introduced sensitive text comparators to make sure sensitive info (like email address, user name) is kept hidden in targeting rules.
Satisfying the feature request of our customers from the mobile app development industry, ConfigCat now supports semantic version (SemVer) based user targeting.
Typical use case where app builders wish to enable or disable features based on the iOS or Android version on the device their app is running on.
For example deciding if 2.3.40 is less than or equals 2.30.4 sometimes not that straightforward by only using the traditional < > = comparators.
How using feature flags makes your product development successful and safe?
By the given example you can follow the process from idea to satisfied customers
Software (or even hardware) development could be a real challenge. Not just because it needs all your attention and a lot of time to do but you cannot be sure (even if you made research on the market) that your customers would like the new feature or product.
That is the reason why product development is not just a part of a job, but it is an independent work. It needs specialists, managers, tactics, and tools too. Having a good idea is far too little to give off the perfect software product - you are going to need the best people and the best tools for that.
You created a new software feature, put it behind a feature flag, and deployed it to production. Now, you want to enable this new feature to some of your users, so you get early feedback, before releasing the new feature to your whole userbase.
But whom to release the new feature first? How to choose the first user segment? And how to target them with feature flag rules?
Lets see some typical real world examples how big companies do it.
A great first step is to enable the new feature to your colleagues, while keeping it hidden from the rest of the world. This enables you to get early feedback from users inside of your company. You'd be surprised how much bug they'll catch on the first day!
Here is how you can segment and target your colleagues with one simple rule in ConfigCat:
The example above assumes that everyone in your organization has an email address in the form of [email protected], or [email protected].
Note how we used the Email property, and the CONTAINS operator to target only those users who work for your company.
This is what needs to be done in your application at the code level:
var user = new User("<userid>") { Email = "[email protected]" };
var god_mode_enabled = client.GetValue("god_mode_enabled", false, user);
Please note, how we used the god_mode_enabled key and the user object here to check whether God Mode is enabled for [email protected].
The example above is in C#, but you can do the same in Java, JS, Python, Go, Ruby, Swift, Kotlin, PHP etc. See examples in other languages.
Another typical strategy is to release new features to users from a specific country only. This strategy enables you to